In modern digital display electronic timepieces costs of production will be linked to the number of digits which it is required to display at any one time. For ordinary timekeeping instruments such as wristwatches six digits will ordinarily suffice and will display hours, minutes and seconds. Should, however, the instrument be further intended to be utilized as a time measuring instrument such as a chronograph more digits may be required and it may be desired to display as well as seconds, hundredths of seconds. Thus a full chronograph display might show in the right hand columns digits indicating from 0 to 99 hundredths of a second, in the next adjacent columns from 0 to 59 seconds, in the next adjacent columns from 0 to 59 minutes and in the left most columns from 0 to 99 hours. This arrangement will obviously require 8 digit columns and for such reason costs will be increased. Where no hours accumulation takes place it will still be possible to limit the display to 6 digit columns. This however renders the instrument somewhat less useful in practice.
To overcome this difficulty it has been suggested to shift the digits alternately between a display of hours, minutes, seconds and a display of minutes, seconds and hundredths of seconds. This, in turn, however, renders the instrument more difficult to use since at any given time the user may be unaware of what is actually displayed.
The present invention provides a solution to this problem which avoids such difficulty to the user and at the same time enables the instrument to be manufactured using only six digit columns thereby reducing its cost of manufacture. The arrangement is such that as long as no hours have been accumulated the display will continuously read out minutes, seconds and hundredths of seconds. In the event that there should be carry over from the minutes accumulator into an hours accumulator indicating that the elapsed time has exceeded one hour, then upon stopping the instrument for reading either following the termination of an event or during reading for lap and split timing there will be an alternating sequence display, one element of the sequence consisting of hours alone displayed in the left most digit columns with the remaining digits being blanked out and the other element of the sequence consisting of the normal display of minutes, seconds and hundredths of seconds. In order to enhance the effect for the user the hours display may be timed to a period which is shorter than that for the minutes, seconds and hundredths of seconds.